UX Overview

Business Values
  • Provide visibility to the offline and content-centric app experience.
  • Emphasize an important element of our searchable offline internet value proposition.
  • Demonstrate to content partners how their content can be adapted and featured.
  • Add more pathways to Endless’s rich app ecosystem, improving user metrics for apps and content.
User Values
  • Removes the idle time sentiment of “now what fo I do.”
  • Reveals to user interesting, educational, and possibly useful content that they might not otherwise know existed
  • Provides “small bite” information promoting daily ongoing learning
  • Adaptive suggestions based on; behavior, friends and seasonality surface the things that users care for (future release)
Leading questions/ problems

Leading into the design process we had a number of questions that we sought to answer.

  • How do we deliver content suggestions that are compelling and add value to the user?
  • How do we tell a compelling story with the content, both with the content design, visuals, type, and editorialization?
  • How are we feeding the content?
  • Which subset of our apps do we use to feed the content (if not all) and how does the varying content types/ structure how they are treated?
  • Do we create a fixed-length feed or something that infinite (ie Instagram/ Facebook)
  • To what extent do we curate or personalize the content. How does this vary user to user or in different locales?
Knowns/ requirements
  • The content offering will lean heavily on the content that already available on the system. This requires flexibility as users’ may have different apps installed.
  • Create an immersive experience that is integrated seamlessly into the Endless Operating system (the way that global search is)
  • Have a way to access this feature that is both highly discoverable and not in the way.
  • Feed based discovery leaning on passive exploration rather than active tasks.

User experience process

I kicked off the project by leading UX ideation/ brainstorming sessions with other members of my team, involving leadership, designers, and content designers to gain a wide perspective of ideas to start with.

We identified some existing product spaces in 3 categories to research, feed, dashboards, and search

Open questions our session revealed.

User motives for engaging in content services

Content ideas

From there I explored widely in low-fidelity wireframes. I explored a range of concepts; interaction models, content design, and layout.

One UX study exploring entry points (launch triggers), content make-up, UX models and layout.

In the end, I narrowed on the direction to the right, a scrolling content feed with a mix of editorialized content, news, videos, and daily trivia features such as “word of the day.”

Global Search's laid back cousin